Research Project: Poseidon

Introduction

Today’s modern high tech systems offer a previously unparalleled variety of feasible applications, made possible by a trend of increasing interactions and collaborations between systems, and their sharing of information, processes, and resources. Altogether, this led to systems whose components are highly complex systems in themselves, called Systems of Systems, abbreviated by SoS.

For well defined situations and applications, the distribution of tasks and resources might be defined in advance, thus regulating the resulting collaboration as well as the integration of the individual systems during implementation. This approach, however, restricts a SoS to its predefined task and configuration, and consumes a considerable amount of resources and time, especially if it becomes necessary to modify the engineered system. The resulting limits on a system of systems flexibility and its abilities to adapt to new scenarios and configurations, as well as to evolve to cover new applications or technologies are no longer acceptable: Future SoS are expected to react adequately to ad-hoc changes, to enable collaboration across former boundaries, to deal with the unexpected, to offer possibilities.

The Poseidon project rises to the challenge to discover new ways on how to build such advanced systems of systems, and therefore on how to allow for flexibility, adaptability and evolvability in systems of systems while ensuring reliability – a crucial requirement, not only in the domain of maritime safety systems that provides Poseidon’s exemplary application and the industrial laboratory needed for its success.

Partners and project organization

Poseidon is a joint project of a consortium of industrial and academic partners. The Embedded Systems Institute (ESI) has the responsibility for project management and knowledge dissemination. Also, ESI Research Fellows coach and supplement the research activities of the academic partners.

Thales Above Water Systems Division, the carrying industrial partner, provides the industrial challenge, expert knowledge in the domain of Maritime Safety and Security Systems, and specialized facilities, e.g. for simulations, experiments, and prototyping. The Above Water Systems Division is part of the Thales Group, a global electronics company delivering mission-critical information systems and services for the Aerospace, Defense, and Security markets. Second participating industrial partner is Noldus Technology, a research driven company that provides professional software and instrumentation for the collection and analysis of behavioral data.

The academic partners are Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, Free University of Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, University of Maastricht, and University of Twente. For part of the project time, researchers are co-located at the ESI facilities or at Thales in Hengelo.

Poseidon started in June 2007, and is partly funded by the Dutch Government.